The Creator Economy is Here. Here’s How Campaigns Can Adapt.

Campaigns are turning to digital creators and influencers to reach increasingly fragmented audiences. 

Groups backing Donald Trump’s and Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaigns paid influencers to weigh in for the candidates. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign in New York City dispatched an army of online creators to reach young voters on TikTok and Instagram. 

Campaigns & Elections recently spoke with three consultants working in the creator space: Double Tap Democracy’s Kait Demchuk and Rachel Irwin, who helped run paid creator programs in the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races this year, and Social Currant’s Ashwath Narayanan, who ran Virginia Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger’s creator program.

Here are some of their tips:

Get the Campaign’s Buy-in

According to Narayan, any creator or influencer program needs to start by winning over the campaign, from the staffers to the candidate. 

“At a super high level, I think the first step is getting buy-in among the entire campaign to engage with creators,” Narayanan said. “Whether that’s thinking through how you make sure that your paid ads firm knows that you’re working with creators or scheduling knows that you’re working with creators to the candidate themselves being open to filming with creators.”

As more and more Americans turn to social media and independent content creators for news and entertainment, campaigns are placing a high premium on influencer partnerships to get their messages across. 

Still, Demchuk acknowledged that it can be difficult to convince campaigns to devote enough of their budgets to such programs from the outset. 

“I think really being clear about what this brings to the overall comms strategy of the team is really critical,” Demchuk said. “As we all know, traditional media is falling by the wayside. The share of voices is really mostly online, and so it’s about being able to make that argument to leadership, to the candidate, surrogate, whoever it is.”

Follower Size Doesn’t Necessarily Equal Success

For a campaign thinking about influencer strategy, it can be tempting to equate someone’s follower count on social media with their effectiveness as a partner. But Demchuk and Narayanan recommended seeking out local or state-level creators, who have close ties with followers in a particular area. 

“We really focus on those creators that are kind of, at the macro level, big within their state – like, big locally, and maybe are about to break through nationally, but not quite,” Demchuk said. “That’s our bread and butter, especially when we’re doing these statewide campaigns.”

Demchuk said that Double Tap Democracy might engage with national-level creators as part of a larger cohort of creators in order to “lift up everybody else’s work.” But the focus, she added, “is really on those macro-level creators.”

Narayanan said seeking out partnerships with local and state-level creators can also lend more weight to their content. He said he worked with one content creator in Virginia named April, who lives in the state and created rapid-response content around the state’s gubernatorial debate in October.

“She’s from Virginia. She lives in Virginia, and the election obviously very much impacts her and her life and her community, and she literally just said that in her video,” Narayanan said.

Cultivate Creators

According to Demchuk, influencer engagement isn’t about singling out political content creators for partnerships. 

Instead, Double Tap Democracy sought out a wide range of influencers with different interests, ranging from lifestyle content to travel, and then cultivated their political engagement.

“Rachel and I really believe in the ladder of engagement structure, where you find creators, figure out what issues they’re really passionate about and use that to segue them into more political content,” Demchuk said.

In New Jersey, Double Tap Democracy partnered with Planned Parenthood to mobilize influencers in support of Sherrill. It was a “natural fit,” Demchuk said, because a lot of creators “really had a connection with reproductive rights and protecting that New Jersey.”

Double Tap Democracy continued to engage with those creators, even after Election Day, sending out surveys asking whether they would continue working in the political space. And according to Demchuk, “all of them said yes.”